


The Price of Freedom

by INMH



Series: hc_bingo Amnesty Fills [7]
Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Attempted Rape/Non-Con, Blood, Dark, Death, Drama, Gen, Gore, Hurt/Comfort, Pre-Movie(s), Strong Language, Tragedy, Violence, War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-17
Updated: 2017-02-17
Packaged: 2018-09-25 03:08:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,307
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9800174
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/INMH/pseuds/INMH
Summary: “What we are doing is ugly. It is cruel and horrible and disgusting, and if we outlive this godforsaken Empire, I expect we’ll be alcoholics and drug addicts within a decade, assuming we haven’t blown our brains out beforehand.”NOTE: No, seriously, mind the warnings. Graphic violence, blood, attempted rape, etc.





	

“Listen,” Draven whispered. “Because I’m going to tell you something nobody else has.”  
  
[---]  
  
The first time, Cassian panicked and threw up.  
  
He was thirteen, seven years after his father had died and he’d run away from home to join the Separatists. The Empire invaded their base camp, began shooting up anything and everything that moved.  
  
Cassian knew how to use a blaster. As a small child he’d been trained to do lesser chores that didn’t put him in the line of fire- less so because they wanted to spare him the trauma and more so because it would be stupid to put a child in a situation that they were in no way equipped to handle. But recently they’d been training him and some of the other kids to use weapons.  
  
So he fumbled frantically with the blaster as the heavy steps of the troopers- Deathtroopers, the terrifying troopers with the black armor that looked considerably more frightening than their white-armored counterparts- came closer to his hiding spot behind some crates. When he’d finally set it to kill, Cassian rose on shaking legs and took aim at the nearest Deathtrooper.  
  
The blast hit him in the chest, melted his armor and cut through to the skin beneath. Deathtrooper armor was built to withstand blaster fire from a distance, not up close, and the blasters Cassian’s group used were illegally modified to pack more of a punch. The damage was significant, and it was ugly.  
  
The smell of burning flesh made his throat constrict and his stomach roll, and Cassian fell to his knees and vomited.  
  
He wasn’t sure how long it was before one of the adults came and dragged him away. He wasn’t sure how long it was until the fighting stopped and the hurried transition to a new camp began.  
  
But it was exactly two weeks until Cassian stopped smelling that unholy mix of melted metal and flesh.  
  
[---]  
  
“War is not noble. War is not righteous. War is not satisfying. Nobody talks about the dirty bits, the things we do every day to keep this bloody Rebellion from being eliminated by the Empire.”  
  
[---]  
  
The second time, it wasn’t much better.  
  
It was only a few days after he’d managed to stop smelling that wretched smell whenever something was being cooked or burned. He and the other kids had been kept tucked away in the safer places in the new camp, and for once, he hadn’t protested. Cassian had been living in a near constant state of nausea since his first kill and barely felt like moving, never mind fighting.  
  
Lari and Pensos, two of Cassian’s friends, shook him awake. It was dark- it could have been in the middle of the night, it could have been near morning, he’d been sleeping so much lately he wasn’t sure.  
  
“Cas! Cas! Come on!” Pensos, an Iktochi boy slightly younger than Cassian, had grabbed a handful of Cassian’s shirt and was physically trying to drag him out of his sleeping bag. It was only when Cassian realized that that was, in fact, blaster-fire that he was hearing, that he jumped out of bed.  
  
“Here,” Lari, a human girl two years older than Cassian who’d been standing guard by the entrance of the tent, shoved a loaded blaster into his hands. Cassian didn’t want it; his entire body repelled the idea of picking one up again, but he was too tired and too panicked to verbalize that, and so Lari physically _forced_ him to keep hold of it. “Let’s go!”  
  
It was so dark.  
  
There were panicked screams ahead of them as they took off into the underbrush to escape the blaster-fire from behind. Cassian, Lari and Pensos were bringing up the rear (his friends had lingered to find and wake him), and it wasn’t long before the heavy sound of Stormtrooper boots pounding the dirt came up behind them. The confirmation came when Lari spun around, assessed the situation, and started firing.  
  
Cassian’s stomach was cramping painfully with anxiety, and he was dangerously close to vomiting. He was terrified of killing, but he was also terrified of Lari, who’d been a sister to him for nearly seven years, getting shot and killed because he was too afraid to pull the trigger.  
  
So he turned around and fired too.  
  
There was more of that terrible smell, but it was far enough away that he was able to ignore it a bit. At some point Cassian’s shoulder erupted into pain, and he wouldn’t realize until later that a blaster-bolt had grazed his shoulder.  
  
At another point, he tripped over something on the ground: A dead Stormtrooper. The visor of his helmet had been smashed open by a blaster-bolt, which was embedded into his forehead. One bloodshot eye seemed to glow in the dark, looking straight up at him with shock.  
  
Cassian turned and stumbled away.  
  
Everything until the sun rose the next morning was blurry. Cassian’s memory of the incident went from fleeing the chaos of the nighttime firefight to lying flat on his belly under a bush next to Pensos, shoulder of his jacket smoldering, and Lari keeping watch nearby.  
  
[---]  
  
“In every war, there’s some faction of people whose responsibility it is to dirty their hands so that everyone else’s can stay clean. And then those same fucking people watch cluck their tongues in judgment, because _they_ think it’s not necessary. And you know why that is?”  
  
[---]  
  
The tenth time, Cassian realized it was not possible to ignore what he’d done when he killed up-close.  
  
He was fourteen, and it was his first time ever to kill someone with something other than a blaster.  
  
The thought of killing with a knife bothered him immensely from the moment Guldrich, the one responsible for training the young orphans in the group, put the blade in his hand and placed him in front of a training dummy.  
  
“Lunge!” He yelled, “Thrust! Duck! Dodge!” And Cassian did his best to follow every instruction to the T, because he was angry at the Emperor taking his father away, and angry at the Stormtroopers for killing his friends and the other members of their Resistance Cell, angry at the Galaxy for allowing his life to be so terrible. Cassian wanted the Empire stopped, and so he trained harder than anyone else.  
  
But inside, the idea of having to kill someone in such close quarters made him sick.  
  
“They deserve it, Cassian,” Lari assured him as she attacked her own training dummy with vigor. “They fucking deserve it. Don’t forget that.”  
  
He didn’t. He really didn’t.  
  
Cassian understood that he was fighting monsters. He understood he was fighting people who had, literally, lined up the children of other Resistance groups (or people even _suspected_ of resistance) and gunned them down in cold blood. He understood that these people had lashed men together and thrown into lakes and oceans. He understood that these were people that had tied people down and slowly driven over them, crushing them to death.  
  
He knew that. He knew that _damn_ well.  
  
But knowing that didn’t make the sight of brain-matter on the ground any less grotesque. It didn’t make realizing that the stain on his pants was from that Stormtrooper he’d shot up close, evidence of what he’d done clinging to his clothing even after several washes. What they’d done to other people did not erase the fact that when the helmets were removed and their faces, frozen in the fear they’d felt in the last seconds of their lives, were revealed.  
  
And it didn’t make shoving a knife into the throat of a Stormtrooper and causing an astonishing amount of blood to flow out any less horrifying.  
  
This was a raid. It was the first one Cassian had been on, and he’d done everything Guldrich had told him to: Aim for the neck, because that’s where trooper armor was weakest; thrust hard, or you might not pierce the material; don’t be afraid to move the knife around once it was in, you’d only be ensuring enough damage to make a kill (or at least, permanent disability); and remember that an impaled body is a shield.  
  
What Guldrich neglected to mention was the sheer amount of _blood_ that comes out when one stabs a man in the throat. Cassian must have pierced an artery, because there was so much of it, it was everywhere, on his hands and shirt and jacket and neck and pants and some of his face until he _finally_ managed to dislodge the knife and shove the body away from him.  
  
The Stormtrooper gurgled on blood as he died. Cassian waited and waited and waited for him to die, rooted to the spot, thankfully no other troopers around to shoot him in his inactivity.  
  
He didn’t die.  
  
And when Cassian stumbled away, grabbing a bag of supplies and turning to follow the others from his group, he heard the gurgling until they’d fled the camp altogether.  
  
[---]  
  
“It’s because _they_ didn’t have to do it. We make the hard decisions in the dark so the people with the reasonably clean hands can parade around in the light as symbols of hope and freedom for people to follow. They _will_ judge you. They _will_ get up on their high bloody horses and talk about the ‘better way’ it could have been done, because they were not there in that moment living what you lived, and _they_ are not the ones up to their necks in a river of shit and making life and death decisions in the moment.”  
  
[---]  
  
The nineteenth time he didn’t even have time to think.  
  
Cassian was fifteen. It was a firefight, four months after the knife incident, and he was so panicked at the fact that they were pinned down and blaster-fire everywhere that he didn’t have time to think or feel or smell or gag.  
  
They fell the way they had in his mind as a child, before he knew better: Without smell, or blood, or screams. The just fell down like his old toys did when he was little, because that was what death had been: Falling down and not getting up again.  
  
That was how they fell now, and had he the presence of mind to be grateful, Cassian would have been.  
  
Lari and Pensos died much the same way. One minute they were standing, and the next they were on the ground, brought down by blaster-bolts to their chests. Lari was slumped against as wall, and Pensos was flat on his back some twenty feet away.  
  
Later on, Cassian would not remember when the fight ended and he was able to find them. He did not remember the actual moment his mind made the connection that the bodies were those of his two closest friends. He remembered little else of the battlefield either, beyond the smell of overheated blasters and the sickly sweet smell of the plants that inhabited the forest surrounding the facility they’d ambushed.  
  
That night, during the cleanup of the captured facility, Guldrich and another man, Larsé, found Cassian and clapped him on the shoulder. “There you are! Where’s Lari? I found her knife.”  
  
“Dead,” Cassian said shortly as he played with the buttons on his jacket and stared into the dark. He’d never been a chatterbox, but since his first kill he’d become absolutely pithy. “Pensos too. Blasters to the chest.”  
  
Larsé looked at him strangely. “Little Andor, are you sure you saw them? That’s not how they-”  
  
Guldrich elbowed him sharply, grabbing Cassian and pushing him away from the bodies. “Leave it,” He snapped to Larsé. “It’s better that way.”  
  
It wouldn’t be until much later that he would learn, after Guldrich had been loosened up by alcohol, that Lari and Pensos had not been shot in the chest.  
  
Lari been shot in the head. Her skull had been blown to pieces. She was only recognizable from her clothing.  
  
And Pensos had been covered in burns. The Deathtroopers had probably used their flamethrowers on him. He, too, was only recognizable by his scarf and boots.  
  
Cassian pulled away from the doorframe, shaking. _I don’t remember that,_ he thought wildly, losing control of his breathing. _I don’t remember that. Lari’s head was fine. Pensos wasn’t burned. They were… They were…_  
  
He wasn’t sure.  
  
Oh Force, he wasn’t sure.  
  
That was the night of Cassian’s first full-blown panic-attack.  
  
[---]  
  
“What we are doing is ugly. It is cruel and horrible and disgusting, and if we outlive this godforsaken Empire, I expect we’ll be alcoholics and drug addicts within a decade, assuming we haven’t blown our brains out beforehand.”  
  
[---]  
  
The twenty-seventh time, it ended with a change of scenery.  
  
Cassian was sixteen, and by now the panic attacks came with a painful regularity. Lari and Pensos’ deaths left a noticeable chasm in his life. He’d had other friends, but there was a noticeable correlation between one’s age and the likelihood of one’s death. Their group was small and picked up refugees and idealists and criminals and angry orphans only occasionally, and Cassian was disinclined to befriend anyone who would probably be dead within a year.  
  
He withdrew into himself. He was calm and professional, but did not extend his formalities into pleasantries. He did not make friends, lacked enough sexual appetite to put effort into finding a partner, and where he’d clung to particular adults when he was small, now he kept his distance from them. After Sheena, a Corellian, grandmotherly woman who’d been responsible for caring for the orphans when Cassian had been a child, had been killed in a firefight when he was eleven, he’d learned the hard way that losing a surrogate parent was as painful as losing the real thing.  
  
Killing came easily now. The smell was still terrible, but bearable. Every now and then a particularly nasty injury or sound or expression on a dead man’s face would haunt him in his sleep, but ultimately they blended together. And frankly, Cassian didn’t remember all of it: Every now and then he’d come across a troubling gap in his memory where a fight or a death should have been, and he found the details hazy at best.  
  
But his new motto was this:  
  
_Every Stormtrooper I kill is one less likely to kill one of my people._  
  
He numbed himself to everyone and everything else.  
  
On a particular day, Cassian was sent on a covert mission to steal some equipment for explosives. Their cell was based in the desert-forest (the red and gold trees, Cassian assumed, survived off of something other than water) outside of an Imperial-occupied town, and he would be expected to slip in and steal the necessary items. He was old enough, strong enough, smart enough, and quiet enough for the job.  
  
Naturally, things went horribly wrong: Cassian was caught, and in the process of becoming not-caught, he pulled out his blaster and started shooting.  
  
His marksmanship was good that day- or maybe it was just that it was relatively close quarters and the Stormtroopers weren’t hard to miss. Cassian shot and ducked, shot and ducked, shot twice and ducked (Guldrich would have slapped him if he was still alive, shooting twice is a good way to take a blaster-bolt to the forehead). The troopers fell like stones, and it was with a rabbit’s twitchy nervousness that Cassian waited for more blaster-fire.  
  
None came.  
  
But that meant nothing, because Stormtroopers weren’t stupid, they’d have radioed for backup by this point, which meant that Cassian had five minutes tops before he had more company. He broke cover, flinching reflexively at the expectation of more blaster-fire, and began picking through the bodies to find the Stormtrooper who’d taken his bag.  
  
The thing about a blaster-bolt is, if the shot was enough to kill, it was enough to pierce armor and body, and so Cassian looked over about seventeen dead Stormtroopers in his attempts to find that fucking bag, and he was well on his way to another panic attack at the possibility of having killed them for nothing if he couldn’t find what he’d set out to steal-  
  
“Looking for something?”  
  
Cassian had his blaster up in record time. His hand shook as it directed the weapon to the man in the doorway.  
  
The man who was currently holding his bag.  
  
“That was some impressive shooting,” The man, sandy-haired and stern-faced, drawled. “Your talents are wasted on this backwoods world. How’d you like to join the Rebel Alliance?”  
  
And Cassian, after some wheedling and hemming and hawing, agreed.  
  
The group he was in functioned too much like a community of neighbors than a community of soldiers. The Rebel Alliance was more like a military organization; nobody, he figured, would play at being family to him there.  
  
Lari and Pensos had looked at him like a brother.  
  
Sheena, as a grandson.  
  
Draven looked at him like a soldier.  
  
[---]  
  
“But it _does_ have to be done. I’m sorry. There’s no two ways around it. If it didn’t have to be done, I wouldn’t be asking you to do it. This is the real fucking world, Cassian, and the real world is not a fairytale where the heroes never have to do ugly things to win.”  
  
[---]  
  
The thirty-fifth time, he _wanted_ the bastard to die.  
  
Cassian was eighteen.  
  
This was his first time employing seduction as an espionage technique. An older intelligence officer, Anton, had been coaxing him through a training regiment that was decidedly different from the ones he’d received from Guldrich, or from the more basic military training he’d received upon joining the Alliance (Incidentally, it was during one of Anton’s training sessions that Cassian ended up losing his virginity).  
  
Cassian was surprisingly adept at molding his face and attitude to what was necessary to make someone believe he was thinking or feeling a certain way. Anton called it acting; Cassian thought that sounded too formal- to him it was a con.  
  
The mark, in this case, was a man with access to the droids that worked in an Imperial chemical weapons plant. All Cassian had to do was distract him long enough for another agent to pick through the man’s house and find pertinent information.  
  
Except that it turned out the mark had a penchant for knives, and for using them on pretty young men.  
  
“Stop,” Cassian croaked when the pointed, sharpened tip of the knife dragged down the slim space between his ribs. It was too easy to picture that which he’d done to others being done to him: Blood erupting from the cut, gagging and gasping and shaking from the pain, dying with his face frozen in terror. “Stop!”  
  
“What’s wrong?” The man grinned down at him, and Cassian’s pulse went haywire. “It’s just a little _prick!_ ” As he said it, he pressed the tip into the skin right above Cassian’s belly-button, and a sharp bolt of pain rain up his spine. “Much smaller than the one I’m about to-”  
  
Cassian hadn’t out-and-out panicked during a mission in years; certainly not since he’d joined with the Alliance. His training kicked in with a vengeance, and the man did not expect the previously pliant, (supposedly) slightly drunk prostitute to be as strong as he was.  
  
The last thing Cassian remembered was kicking him away.  
  
And suddenly he was straddling his hips, a stone… Paperweight? Bookend? It was heavy and felt like stone and it was in Cassian’s hands, and the man was dead. His jaw was crushed, blood and broken teeth on the floor.  
  
Cassian dropped the object and stumbled for the door.  
  
His descent to the lower floors, where the other agent was peeking around, went poorly. His arms and legs were shaking madly, and he banged his knees and elbows on the wall on the way down.  
  
“Andor? Andor, are you alright?” The other agent came around the corner from the kitchen, and her eyes widened when she saw the state he was in. “What happened? Are you alright?”  
  
It took Cassian everything he had not to lower himself to the floor and wait until the shaking stopped. “He’s dead.”  
  
Her face darkened. “Really? Shit. Are you alright?” The repetition of that question was a pretty clear indicator that Cassian looked anything but okay.  
  
“Fine,” He choked out. “I’m fine.”  
  
Cassian leaned against the wall until she was done looking, the body upstairs a screaming presence in his mind.  
  
[---]  
  
“The stakes are too high. If we fail, then the galaxy is condemned to existence under the Empire indefinitely. Palpatine will rule until he dies, and then someone just like him will take his place. The Empire, they’re not just _talking_ about eliminating us: They are _doing_ it. They are burning villages. They are gathering civilians together and executing them en masse. This is not blowhard rhetoric in the Senate. This is an immediate, undeniable threat to our existence.”  
  
[---]  
  
The forty-fourth time, Cassian hated himself.  
  
Hated himself, hated himself, _hated_ himself.  
  
Cassian was twenty, and there was an informant named Dolan.  
  
Dolan had given Rebel Intelligence steady information about the Imperial activities on his home-world.  
  
And at some point, it had become apparent that the Empire was closing in on Dolan as the reason why their movements were being so stymied on that planet.  
  
Dolan panicked, did a heel-face turn, and gave some information to an Imperial Officer, who would be visiting again for more information.  
  
And that was where Cassian came in.  
  
Dolan knew too much. He knew way, _way_ too much. He’d been to the base on Yavin 4, for the Force’s sake. “They always say they’ll never tell them everything,” Draven had rumbled grimly. “But the Empire could care less about the truth, or about the lives of the people at their mercy. They can smell fear, they’ll push and push and rip the finger nails out of every member of his family until they’re satisfied they have _everything_ he knows. Dolan will break.”  
  
Looking into the man’s eyes, Cassian saw exactly what he meant.  
  
But this was his first time killing a man who wasn’t an enemy, and his hand shook on the blaster trigger in a way it hadn’t in a very, very long time.  
  
“Please,” Dolan begged, eyes wide with pain and fear and regret. “Please, I’m sorry. They’ll kill my family if I don’t. They’ve been questioning my coworkers. _Please_.”  
  
Cassian’s breath caught in his throat. “I’m sorry,” he said, the words coming out seemingly without his brain’s permission. “I’m sorry.”  
  
He fired the blaster.  
  
It was the first time Cassian had ever truly, deeply, _completely_ hated himself for something he’d done in the name of the Rebellion. This was a man who tried to do the right thing, and then panicked for the potential repercussions for his family. Cassian had not completely forgotten what it was to love someone enough to make moral and emotional sacrifices for them.  
  
In a way, that was why he’d killed Dolan, why he hadn’t dropped the blaster and shoved the man out the door and told him to run.  
  
_Your act of mercy might doom the Rebellion_ , he’d told himself. _And billions of other little boys will bury their fathers, and their grandmothers, and their friends. And it will be your fault._  
  
It was not out of love for the other members of the Rebellion.  
  
It was out of a desperate need to stop anyone else from knowing his hell.  
  
Like so many others, Dolan’s emotions were etched on his face in death.  
  
Not fear, or pain, or regret, though:  
  
It was a deep, agonizing sadness.  
  
Cassian did not forget that.  
  
He would _never_ forget that.  
  
[---]  
  
Draven looked at him with a sympathy that was not typical to see on his face. “That’s the truth of it, Cassian.”  
  
[---]  
  
Cassian heard every word.  
  
Admittedly, it took him a little longer to process everything through the potent haze of the alcohol currently chugging through his system.  
  
It had been a long time since he’d cried, not since he was fifteen and Lari and Pensos had been killed, but the pillow under his head was currently drenched with tears.  
  
“This can’t be the only way,” He mumbled. “There has to be a better way.”  
  
Draven sighed. “If there were, we’d be doing it. The field is messy; you know that. If we could give everyone who deserved to die a quick, clean death, and spare the ones who didn’t one-hundred percent deserve it, we would, Cassian. The world is ugly. The world is unfair. And if we’re lucky, the upcoming generation will be living in safety and comfort and never have to understand this hell.”  
  
He reached over and grasped Cassian’s shoulder tightly. It wasn’t the action of a parent comforting a child, or a friend comforting a friend; it was the action of a comrade who knew all too well the compromises one made in times of war, who knew what it was to lose spaces of time and sleep four hours a night at best.  
  
“I won’t say it gets better with time,” Draven said. “But if we live long enough to see the end of this, we might find some shred of happiness. Something worth living for.” He gave Cassian’s shoulder another squeeze before pulling away. “Just have to keep going until we get there.”  
  
Cassian nodded heavily.  
  
It seemed laughable to think that this misery would ever dissipate, that he would ever be able to find a shred of happiness that he would be worthy of experiencing after what he’d done, after what he might be forced to do in the future.  
  
But for Draven’s sake, for the Rebellion’s sake, he would keep going anyway. Otherwise it would all have been for nothing.  
  
And if it was for nothing, he wouldn’t be able to live with himself.  
  
-End


End file.
